This book will attempt to guide you through all the fundamental parts of GNOME, to explain how things work and why. Rather than taking you through an exhaustive listing of function calls and coding semantics, the book will concentrate on what makes GNOME tick. It will certainly go into detail about the important function calls and how to use them, but you'll still want to keep the official GNOME and GTK+ documentation on hand. The official documents are free, just like the rest of GNOME, and should even be bundled with your GNOME distribution.

When you finish with this book, you should have a very clear, intuitive understanding of the GNOME 1.2 framework. You'll be able to write a complete GNOME application, from front to back. If you run into problems, you'll know how to diagnose the problem and where to look for the answers. It's impossible to know absolutely everything, but this book should at least identify everything you need to know.

Since the core GNOME libraries are written in C, you'll want to know how to read C code. Although not critical, some knowledge of the GTK+ widget library will help. And if you're a Win32 programmer interested in writing a GNOME application, this book is the one you need to get started.

Your starting point for online documentation about GNOME development should always be http://developer.gnome.org . This site contains the complete up-to- date API documentation for both GTK+ and GNOME, as well as an assortment of articles and white papers. Much of this information is distributed with GNOME itself, so you don't necessarily have to go online for access to the developer documents.